


Currents of the Force

by DestielsDestiny



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Pre-Slash, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-23
Updated: 2016-04-23
Packaged: 2018-06-04 02:33:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6637747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DestielsDestiny/pseuds/DestielsDestiny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Poe has a dream, every night. It always ends the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Currents of the Force

Poe has a dream, ever night. It’s not the same dream, that dream he dreams every night. It can’t be, for something can not be the same as what came before if it is not always the same. 

And the dream is not always the same. It is never the same. Not all the way through. 

It always starts with a little boy, and a tree. But sometimes that boy is short, shorter than the lowest branch of the tree. Sometimes he’s a little taller, sometimes he’s as impossibly tall as the tree is impossibly vast. 

Sometimes he perches in the branches, still as a bird. 

Sometimes he runs about the trunk, as fast as a squirrel. 

Sometimes he dashes in and out of the forest, as quick as a deer. 

There is always a man in the branches of the tree, his hair as golden as the Fall leaves, his eyes as blue as the summer sky. But sometimes he’s dressed in black, sometimes white, sometimes leather, sometimes orange. 

Sometimes he has a blue droid, sometimes an orange one. Sometimes he brings friends, people who sit under the tree and laugh and cry and hug and laugh some more. Sometimes the little boy runs down the tree and sits on the people’s knees, eating cookies and laughing along with them. 

Sometimes he stays in the tallest branches of the tree, hidden from view to everyone but the blue eyes that never seem to quite leave his gaze. 

There is always a shadow lurking at the edge of the dream, menacing and changeable and quiet. Sometimes it’s of indeterminate shape, sometimes it seems to hover around the head of each person. Sometimes it streams through the air, snuffing out the sky, suffocating the man with the blue eyes. Poe always wakes up screaming when that happens, cutting off the dream as if it was never there. 

Sometimes the shadow becomes a tall, thin boy with wild black hair and tortured brown eyes, standing on the edge of the clearing and watching, just watching. He used to climb the tree too sometimes, but Poe hasn’t dreamed that in years and years. 

Those variations of the dream always lead to Poe waking gasping, plastered in warm sweat with a name poised, forever unsaid, on his parched and bitten lips. 

He never goes back to sleep on those nights. 

Sometimes, on the nights when it’s just the little boy, the tree, and the blue eyed man, he wishes he could never wake up again.   
Poe has a dream every night. It’s not the same dream. It can’t be. Because it always begins differently. 

\--

Poe had an interesting relationship with the Skywalker-Solo family. That was what everyone called them, everyone in that little circle of rebels turned friends turned family who took on an Empire and dared not to lose. 

They don’t exactly have a communal comming list, they settle in far flung reaches of the galaxy, and they never exactly definitively win, per se, but ten years into a galaxy without a Death Star and they somehow all frequently meet up for meals, at least several times every cycle. 

Poe’s parents’ house is one of the favourite spots to gather, particularly in the early days, and Poe’s earliest memories involve a huge number of orange and white clad people pressed into a small earthen kitchen on the edge of the forest, being passed from person to person like a precious cargo whose feet are never allowed to touch the floor. 

Poe isn’t sure how he tells everyone apart in that situation, but his favourite moment of the hot potato chain is always being handed to the golden haired pilot at the end of the line. He always makes sure that pilot is at the end of the line, even when everyone is seated in a random pattern with no discernable procession or order, because then he can stay sitting quietly on the golden haired pilot’s knee until his mother shoos him out to play. 

And sometimes, particularly as he grows a bit taller and stronger, he manages to hold onto the pilot’s strange metal fingers long enough to drag him out into the back garden to play Seek and Find seek in Poe’s special tree. 

The leaves usually only rustle for Poe, but whenever the blue-eyed pilot follows the boy outside, a veritable symphony of sound lights up the summer air. 

It always makes the pilot smile. So Poe always smiles too. 

It will always remain the happiest he can every remember being. 

Poe has a dream every night. It isn’t the same dream. Some parts are always different. 

But some parts always stay the same. 

\--

Poe thinks he almost remembers the Battle of Endor. He was almost old enough to remember it anyway, the anxious waiting of a small group of hidden elderly and children, hidden from the Empire in a galaxy that didn’t know anyone was even trying to end the need to hide forever. 

His parents always tell the story like that, with the wide eyed absoluteness and certainty of the wide eyed youths they were. 

Poe watches Rey and Finn talk about defeating the First Order, about ending the War, bringing Peace and Justice to the galaxy, like it’s a finite effort, hard and tough and seemingly endless, but something that is still achievable, finite, measureable, and he wonders if he was ever that young. 

He wonders why he suspects the answer was always no. 

Except that for all that he’s never quite sure if he remembers the Battle of Endor, he knows that he definitely remembers the aftermath. Remembers what it cost to win. 

And maybe that’s the answer. 

Because he remembers his mother’s soft, bruised and red and wet face as she came to get him, still dressed in orange and white. 

Remembers the crackling sounds of nighttime fires, the fuzzy shapes and soft trills of Endor’s small statured population. 

Remembers blue eyes reflecting red flames, the warm, safe feeling of black clothed hands, the faint scents of some smoke other than wood, the soothing rumble of a voice, lulling his sleepy head off to sleep, a steel fingered hand gently running through his hair, even as wetness trickled down onto his forehead. 

Poe always remembers meeting Luke Skywalker, the day the man destroyed the second Death Star, the day a simple farm boy from Tatooine brought an empire to its knees. 

The day Luke Skywalker became an orphan. The day he prevented Poe from sharing that same fate. 

Poe remembers that that night, safe in Luke’s arms, for one of the only times in his life, he did not dream a single thing. 

\--  
Kes Dameron dies the day that Poe blows up the Second Star Killer base. In perhaps one of the cruelest twists Poe’s ever seen, one that he can blame on no one but mother nature herself, it was entirely coincidental. 

Poe received the news before he even took off for the mission, the General clutching an actual printed communique to her chest as if to ward off a bullet, approaching Poe with the kind of weighted grief he hasn’t seen since the day she finally told him what really happened to Ben. 

She doesn’t offer to let him sit the mission out. Poe understands a little bit more of that grief when he replays the tenses of her sentence. Dying. As in, not yet dead. 

Poe doesn’t say anything. He just nods once, his chin strangely heavy, spins on his heel, and marches back to Black One. 

He ignores the blue eyes that follow him every step of the way. 

He flies the mission. Because if Poe learned anything from his childhood, it was what doing your duty looks like. No matter the personal cost. In spite of the personal cost. 

Still, if knowing Luke Skywalker taught him anything, it was what doing your duty to your father looks like. Regardless of the personal consequences. 

So Poe flies the mission, destroys the base, wins the war, restores some hope for some measure of peace and justice to the galaxy, leads his squadron back into secure space, and then hyper jumps to Yavin.

Somehow, saving the galaxy only took a little over three hours between leaving the flight deck and landing outside his childhood home, and damn even Poe didn’t know he was quite that good of a pilot, but even that wasn’t quite fast enough. 

\--

Poe stumbles out into the back garden minutes or hours after saying his final farewells to a man who gave him life, a name and a home and a rather happy childhood. A man who he was too late to say goodbye to in person, too late by less than an hour. 

Poe stumbles to the base of his tree, his hands finding the rough, golden bark, the texture muted under the pilot gloves he has yet to remove. 

A familiar rustling, somehow equal measures haunting and comforting, draws his gaze upwards. 

A man sits perched in the lower branches of Poe’s tree, hair more like the silver leaves of Winter than the golden ones of Fall, eyes still as blue and endless as the summer sky behind his weary shoulders. 

The man meets Poe’s gaze, tears slowly etching their way down his face, and for just a moment, quite inexplicably, he smiles. 

So Poe smiles too. 

\--

Poe has a dream, every night. It isn’t the same dream. It can’t be. Because it never starts quite the same. It changes, with time and life and years. It adapts, grows up, laughs and cries, ages and lengthens, shortens and blossoms, and everything in between. 

But it always ends the same.   
\--

There is a boy, and his tree, and a man with eyes as blue as the summer sky. 

And this is how their dream begins.


End file.
